Monday, March 28, 2016

MEET CHAPTER 313, OR THE TEXAS CORPORATE FREE LUNCH

By Patrick Michels
The Texas ObserverSpeaking in low voices and idly watching their fishing lines, a handful of men and women mingle on a secluded pier at the southern tip of Texas. 
Drivers rush past on the highway above, east toward the discount shops and beach bars of Port Isabel and South Padre Island, or west to the shrimp shacks and shipbreakers at the end of the Brownsville Ship Channel. 
Here, in between, are acres of wetlands, the tidal flats of the Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge, where a cast of songbirds and raptors shuffles in and out with the seasons. A quarter-million ducks stop by every November. There’s also a population of ocelots, small enough to count, driven in by encroaching development.
Soon, this pier could sit at the heart of a great new industrial district, the likes of which the Rio Grande Valley has never seen. Sprawling facilities will receive natural gas from the Eagle Ford Shale, convert it to liquid form and ship it to Latin America, Europe and Asia, where it commands a higher price. Five liquefied natural gas (LNG) exporters have lease agreements here on the ship channel. 
Three of them, including Annova LNG, have filed plans with federal regulators. Annova wants to build its terminal just across the channel from this pier. Tankers capable of holding 40 million gallons of LNG would chug in from the Gulf, ease into a dock and fill up from storage tanks the size of tall buildings.Jaime J. Zapata Memorial Boat Ramp

Patrick Michels: Fishermen at the Jaime J. Zapata Memorial Boat Ramp, across the Brownsville Ship Channel from Annova LNG’s planned export facility.

It’s a tantalizing prospect to the Valley’s business boosters, but the plans have drawn resistance from environmentalists and nearby residents, many of whom work in businesses that depend on tourists looking for unspoiled beaches. 
The “Save RGV from LNG” movement secured anti-LNG resolutions from the city councils of South Padre Island, Port Isabel and others by offering a simple, powerful vision. Look around, the activists said, do you want this to be another Corpus Christi? 
The resolutions were sternly worded but couldn’t do much to block the project. Last summer, Annova came to the Point Isabel Independent School District, which includes Port Isabel and South Padre Island, to ask for a $120 million tax break for its new terminal. So the activists made their case to the school board, too — but this time, as they learned, the stakes were much higher.
Property taxes are the largest source of funding for Texas public schools, and big industrial projects can add lots of new money to the school system quickly.
Annova’s LNG terminal alone would be worth more than the tax base of one-quarter of Texas school districts. Companies pay most of their tax bill to the local school districts. For certain big projects, though, districts can forgive most of that sum using the Texas Economic Development Act, a 15-year-old program that’s often known by its place in the tax code, Chapter 313.
That program actually makes it worthwhile for school districts to give away millions in tax revenue.
Under the law, if a school district grants a tax break for a desirable new project, the state is obliged to cover the difference. The cost of the deal comes out of the state budget. In its application to Point Isabel ISD, Annova said its terminal would be valued at $1.4 billion, but wanted the school district to pretend for the next 10 years that it was worth just $25 million. 
The tax break, Annova told the district, would be “a key component” in its decision to build. In fact, as local activists learned, the whole point of the Chapter 313 program was to lure business to Texas that might go elsewhere.
 If the school board rejected Annova’s deal, maybe the company really would pack up and leave. The school board vote, then, wasn’t going to be just another sternly worded resolution — it could be, locals hoped, the Achilles’ heel that could kill the project for good.

To read the rest of this arcicleFor the rest of this article, click on link: https://www.texasobserver.org/chapter-313-texas-tax-incentive/

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

this is what happens after...

https://www.facebook.com/912883318781096/photos/a.983681555034605.1073741829.912883318781096/988890794513681/?type=3&theater

Anonymous said...

All you dumb fucks against LNG need to do your research. It will not harm our area and we will not become another Corpus Christi. Take a tour of the Brownsville Port and educate yourself on the types of businesses we do, and you will see we are extremely diversified. Corpus is almost completely dependent on refinery, something we don't do.

Let's welcome all the LNG companies we can and make Brownsville great again.

Anonymous said...

To the guy calling people dumb fucks-look in the mirror pendejo. We dont want a 42" pipleline and all the other infrastructure that comes with it nor do we want to help contribute more to the second biggest green house gas - methane. If we give you a job can we fuck up your beautiful country? Sure how far do you want me to bend over. Bola de pendejos. Diversification means renewable energy too. LNG-GTFOH.

Anonymous said...

To the guy telling the dumb-fuck guy to look in the mirror. Open your fucking eyes you arrogant piece of shit. How do you expect the city of Brownsville to grow and prosper? Of course you think by adding more taco stands it will help. you're a fucking tard

John said...

Look at look at all the oil and gas threats facing us just here in our small part of the world. Our Port is doing all it can as fast as it can (including a Memorandum of Understanding with the Panama Canal Authority) to help complete a network of highly flammable condensate trains and explosive oil trains, fracked gas pipelines, barges, and tanker ships to connect three fracking fields and the Perdido fold with fracked oil, natural gas, and other petroleum related products with markets in Mexico, Asia, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere.

The three fracking fields include 1) the Delaware Basin in west Texas (by train), 2) Eagle Ford north of us, and 3) northern Mexico's Burgos Basin (just the other side of the Rio Grande River from us).

Other parts of the package include 1) the three LNG export operations; 2) a condensate operation that will bring two trains a day, 120 rail tanker cars each, through a number of our local communities; 3) offshore Gulf drilling in the Perdido Foldfield (135 miles due east of Brownsville, where Shell is drilling deeper and pushing the limits harder than BP's Deepwater Horizon); and 4) our Port's building of a new oil dock and repairing of an old one.

rita